The other aspect of the game that stands out is the audio. Much like Medal Of Honor: Allied Assault, everything sounds right. Bullets ricocheting off metal sound different than when they hit wood (wood even splinters when hit). Even the ricochet effects change depending on how the shot was fired. As mentioned above, the Ghoul II engine allows for "tear zones" on enemies that come off when shot or stabbed, and there's nothing quite as disturbing as hearing the squirting sound of an enemy's jugular after you take their head off with a shotgun.

In short, the audio and visuals of the game are definitely above par. Now for the bad... which is, unfortunately, just about everything else. The game is definitely centered around mindless shooting, although the game designers attempt to convince you otherwise (with "stealth missions"). The game is basically one large slaughter-fest. Although this may kick up the adrenaline for the first hour or two of playtime, by the time you've been doing this for eight hours and still are only halfway through the game, it gets tedious, frustrating and boring. In addition throughout the game, and especially annoying during the "stealth missions," the enemies have increadibly good eyesight. Basically this means that if you can see them in any way, shape or form... they can see you, which will set off the alarm. In "non-stealth" levels, once the alarm's been activated in a level, it never goes off. In "stealth missions" if the alarm goes on, you lose the level.

Additionally, one of the largest downfalls of the game is the linear design of the levels. Forget the beautiful, open-ended levels Deus Ex gave us (basically, here are your weapons, here are your skills, you figure out how to pass the level). In Soldier of Fortune II, your objective ALWAYS lies at the end of a long stretch of a large, linear landscape where all the doors (save one or two) are mysteriously and conveniently locked. If you play through the game a second time, it'll be just like the first since any potentially alternate route to reach the object is also conveniently blocked off, closed or otherwise inaccessible. Furthermore, the goals of many of the levels require similar guess work as the "pixel hunting" in old puzzle games did. For example, your objective might be to "enter the chemical building" or something to that effect. To get into the building you have to find the ONE correct door out of the 40 doors that line the street. This becomes frustrating after about ten minutes of no success. Speaking of chemicals, the plot of Soldier of Fortune II centers around thwarting the potential spread of a deadly virus... too bad that's been done too much already.

Finally, the biggest problem I had with the game was the way you actually fired. It sounds obvious, but in a first-person shooter, emphasis should be placed on making the activity of simply shooting the gun relatively easy. Aiming shouldn't be a pain in the ... It may have been my set-up (although I checked my configuration many times to make sure it wasn?t my settings), but when I would move the mouse just the tiniest bit left or right, the crosshairs would jump 5 to 7 pixels in that given direction. That may not seem like much until you realize that unless the enemy is within arms reach, you're likely to actually "jump" over the enemy's head (or entire body depending on their distance from you). Add this to the fact that unless you shoot an enemy in the head or take off one of their limbs, it generally takes around five hits to take an enemy down (shoot them once in the thigh with a pistol and they often just "shake it off" like a bad Steven Seagal movie). This can be annoying since it means you?ll probably reload your save games a lot. I consider myself pretty good at first-person shooters, but this one had me reloading every couple minutes. Very frustrating.

So although there's a lot of eye candy (i.e. "gore") and the audio's pretty good, make sure you play Soldier of Fortune II before you buy it. Just because it looks cool doesn't mean it won't end up being very frustrating.


OSX in the house   November 3, 2002
 3 out of 5 found this review helpful

Honestly the PC guy who says macs aren't for games is living in the old days. Allot of FPS run a little slower on the mac because they were optimized for the pc and then ported to the mac. SOF2 runs well in multiplayer, in single player it can get choppy with the Geforce 4mx. I'm sure it would be fine with a Geforce Ti though.